Kotaku takes a look at ten different videogame industry analysts and analyzes the accuracy of their claims, proving the hardest part about being an industry pundit is fooling someone into giving you a proper soapbox.
My personal rate of success is a perfect ten, since I strive to be wrong always. HD DVD will rise again!
Analyzing the Analysts, Episode One [Kotaku]
I’m not sure why anyone takes these yahoos seriously. Take Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan who Kotaku interviews for its piece and ends up scoring him as 60% accurate. Yet, Pachter is so clueless about the industry that he told The New York Times back in 2005 that World of Warcraft was just a fad,
“I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month. World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it’s the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers.
It may continue to grow in China, but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
At the risk of over-analysing this analysis of analysts, it’s mildly funny that a slide about industry accuracy spells it “indistry”.
Unless that’s an American spelling, like “analyzing”?